“Yes,” said George Graves more hopefully, “and that stuff they use would kill you anyway.
They pump you full of it.”
With shrunken heart, Eugene considered.
The ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him.
In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had foreseen his waking life-indeath, his slow, frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from the ground a call for hands.
Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the dark central corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns.
A sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedar-wood floated on the cool heavy air.
Dimly, beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy casket, on a wheeled trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet coverings.
The thick light faded there in dark.
“They’re laid out in the room behind,” said George Graves, lowering his voice.
To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with the friendless bodies of unburied men.
At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a tear), the very Reverend Father James O’Haley, S.J., among the faithless faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged plumply from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk short-legged strides, and came out into the light.
His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set firmly in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a small well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue.
Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of his great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable, seen the unknowable.
In this remote outpost of the mighty Church, he was the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate flesh of God.
“They don’t get any pay,” said George Graves sorrowfully.
“How do they live, then?” Eugene asked.
“Don’t you worry!” said George Graves, with a knowing smile.
“They get all that’s coming to them.
He doesn’t seem to be starving, does he?”
“No,” said Eugene, “he doesn’t.”
“He lives on the fat of the land,” said George Graves.
“Wine at every meal.
There are some rich Catholics in this town.”
“Yes,” said Eugene.
“Frank Moriarty’s got a pot full of money that he made selling licker.”
“Don’t let them hear you,” said George Graves, with a surly laugh.
“They’ve got a family tree and a coat of arms already.”
“A beer-bottle rampant on a field of limburger cheese, gules,” said Eugene.
“They’re trying to get the Princess Madeleine into Society,” said George Graves.
“Hell fire!” Eugene cried, grinning.
“Let’s let her in, if that’s all she wants.
We belong to the Younger Set, don’t we?”
“You may,” said George Graves, reeling with laughter, “but I don’t.
I wouldn’t be caught dead with the little pimps.”
“Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at a hot wienie roast given to members of the local Younger Set at Dixieland, the beautiful old ancestral mansion of his mother, Mrs. Eliza Gant.”
George Graves staggered.
“You oughtn’t to say that, ‘Gene,” he gasped. He shook his head reproachfully.
“Your mother’s a fine woman.”
“During the course of the evening, the Honorable George Graves, the talented scion of one of our oldest and wealthiest families, the Chesterfield Graveses, ($10 a week and up), rendered a few appropriate selections on the jews-harp.”
Pausing deliberately, George Graves wiped his streaming eyes, and blew his nose.
In the windows of Bain’s millinery store, a waxen nymph bore a confection of rakish plumes upon her false tresses, and extended her simpering fingers in elegant counterpoise.
Hats For Milady.
O that those lips had language.
At this moment, with a smooth friction of trotting rumps, the death-wagon of Rogers–Malone turned swiftly in from the avenue, and wheeled by on ringing hoofs.
They turned curiously and watched it draw up to the curb.
“Another Redskin bit the dust,” said George Graves.
Come, delicate death, serenely arriving, arriving.
“Horse” Hines came out quickly on long flapping legs, and opened the doors behind.
In another moment, with the help of the two men on the driver’s seat, he had lowered the long wicker basket gently, and vanished, quietly, gravely, into the fragrant gloom of his establishment.